Artima Developer is an online community where developers learn from experts
in the software industry as well as interact, share information, and learn
from each other. Artima Developer provides in-depth technical articles, interviews
with shakers and movers in the software world, targeted news, interest groups,
weblog communities, book chapters, discussion forums, and more. Through high-quality
content and community features, Artima Developer aims to facilitate the sharing of
software best practices that enable our audience to improve their craft of programming.

If you have a question or comment about the site itself, please email webmaster AT artima.com.

About the Name

Bill Venners came up with the name "Artima" in 1992, when he was working with
two other partners on an educational software product. He constructed
the name by extracting
two letters each from three verbs: learn, think, and imagine.

These three verbs captured what Bill and his partners hoped the educational software product
would inspire their customers to do--to learn, think, and imagine.
Thus, the company name, "Artima,&quot represented the company's
mission.
In addition, splitting the name in the middle yielded "Art Ima". Ima
in Japanese means now, so the name could also be interpreted as
the command, "Art Now!" This seemed cool, so the partners agreed
they would eventually use the name Artima Software Company for their partnership.
In 1993, however, the partnership dissolved and Bill Venners bought the rights to the
Artima name. He registered the name in Santa Clara County,
California
and began doing custom software development and consulting as
Artima Software Company. In early 2000, he incorporated Artima Software Company,
which then became known as Artima Software, Inc. In late 2006, since the focus of the
company had moved from software to media, Bill changed the corporation's name
to Artima, Inc.

Learn, think, and imagine are at the center of Artima's current mission: to bring
people together so they can interact, share information, and learn
from each other.

In the very early days of Artima.com, the top of every page contained a small applet next to
the "Artima.com" logo. This applet served as the Artima icon. Bill Venners quickly realized that having an
applet on each page was not a good idea, because it slowed page access and occasionally (OK,
regularly) caused Netscape Navigator to crash. So he pulled the applet from the logo, but in
his heart still considered it to be the Artima icon. Eventually, he found a way to
incorporate the image of that icon back into the site. The icon now serves as the Artima.com dingbat,
which appears at the end of each article and book chapter.
If you're curious about the icon, check
out The Artima Icon: A Base 16 Numeral System.
Look here for an example of the Artima icon dingbat.